Apple’s New A11 Bionic Packs One Hell of a Wallop

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For the past five years, Apple has built its own CPU cores and marched to the beat of its own unique drum. Unlike the various Android vendors, including Samsung and Qualcomm, Apple has eschewed higher core counts in favor of better single-threaded performance. While companies like Qualcomm went wide, with features like big.Little and up to eight CPU cores, Apple has stuck to a high-performance dual-core architecture.

That trend holds true with the A11 Bionic. While it packs six CPU cores, only two of them are high-performance chips — the other four are lower-power cores. Apple has yet to release any information on exactly when the SoC shifts from one set of cores to the other, or whether it uses a big.Little implementation or its own unique architecture. Performance results for the A11 Bionic are hitting the internet, however, and the new SoC looks quite potent.

In Geekbench 4, the new A11 Bionic scores a 4189, putting it ahead of the iPad Pro and ~22 percent faster than the iPhone 7. Multi-core performance for the iPhone 8 / 8 Plus / X is almost 2x faster than the iPhone 7. Some sites are reporting that this puts the A11 Bionic over even the Intel Core i5-7267U in Apple’s MacBook Pro 13-inch, as shown in the chart below:

How true this is seems to depend on which Geekbench 4 scores you use for the MacBook Pro 13-inch. The fastest scores listed on the site’s web browser are a 4571 for single-core and a 9443 for multi-core. That’s one reason I’ve stayed away from using Geekbench in reviews — those scores are 8 percent faster in single-core and 5 percent faster in multi-core, but it’s enough to make the difference between besting the new A11 in single-core and beating the Apple iPhone X in multi-core and being tied in one and surpassed by all three new devices in the other.

It’s an unfortunate limit of the platforms that there’s no real way to benchmark an Apple SoC in applications that more closely resemble the workloads laptop users will actually run. Geekbench’s scores imply that Apple’s A11 Bionic has closed the efficiency gap with Intel, a tremendous achievement, but there are a few caveats. Geekbench 4 only uses AVX2 in one floating-point workload and doesn’t specify which SIMD instruction sets it supports for integer code at all. I’m leery of drawing major conclusions concerning Intel-versus-Apple performance without more comparisons. But the overall trends are clear: Regardless of how Intel and Apple would compare against each other in different tests, Geekbench shows Apple has been steadily adding performance year-on-year at a faster rate than Intel has.

Anyone hungry for Apple to build its own unilateral CPU architecture across its entire product line is going to be waiting awhile; there are major differences between building fast dual-core architectures and building a chip with 8-24 high-end CPU cores. Getting the cache architecture and bus structure correct is a major lift, even when the CPU core is strong enough to be worth adopting in a given space, and Windows compatibility is still a major positive for macOS users.In the short term, Intel has little to fear. In the long term, that could change: Apple doesn’t shift away from or towards new architectures at the drop of a hat, but it does shift when the advantages are big enough.

The fact that Apple is starting to add more CPU cores should make Intel a little nervous. Right now, it’s got nothing to worry about. Four years from now, things could look quite different.